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I am Brian Holt. Ask me anything.

Brian is currently working as a senior cloud developer advocate at Microsoft and he's all about developers, developers, developers. Previously he was a JavaScript engineer at Netflix, LinkedIn and Reddit. When not working, Brian finds time to teach on Frontend Masters, run his mouth on Front End Happy Hour, travel all over the world, and play with his adorable dog. Brian is currently a resident of Seattle, WA.

Ask Brian Holt about:

Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud Computing

JavaScript advice

Working at Microsoft

Getting started with programming

Open Source Ecosystem

This was super fun!! Thanks for all the great questions, hopefully I was able to answer the questions burning your mind! Feel free as always to reach out to me on Twitter!

69 discussions

Great question. My first "big tech job" was Reddit. I got that job by posting in the JavaScript subreddit and they messaged me so not super reproducible.

My best advice see if you can make friends with people that work at those companies. They'll be able to give you advice on how to pass the interviews, what they ask, and if you want to work there. Sarah Drasner helped me get my job at Microsoft and Derrick Showers helped me get my job at LinkedIn. Knowing someone always helps.

Beyond that, brushing up on your interview skills is essential. Being a good engineer and a good interviewee are (unfortunately) orthogonal skill sets. Cracking the Coding Interview, Code Katas, and all those things that help you reason through abstract problems quickly will help with Big Tech's silly interview process.

Long time listener, first time caller. Big fan. Hey so something I always wanted to know: when Luna licks you all over your face when you come home, and Niki makes you wash it, are you sad? Do you wish you could keep the Luna slobber around as a token of affection? You can tell us the truth.

Good and bad, like any tech stack. It has its tech debt which was painful to work with at times but the advantage is having a lot of smart people always striving for great code together. It's a complicated beast so that did make working on parts of it tough but on the whole I enjoyed writing code there.